Need for Speed: SHIFT - Drift Reveal

Need for Speed: SHIFT - Driver Profile

Need for Speed: SHIFT - GT2 Reveal

I'm mainly posting this video mainly for the scene & background transition. Looks & feels cool to me.

StarCraft II Beta

SWEET~~~ Calling out to all potential SC II beta testers.

Yeah well beta testing sign-ups are open so why are you hardcore gamers still doing playing that old game? Get to it and sign up to be a SC II beta tester via Battle.net Account Management, create a beta profile of your system specification and get notified to be a beta tester...

Ohhhhh..... I just can't wait. More details here at this link.

Need For Speed: SHIFT

This is the 1st game I've ever worked on.

OnLive

Sweet~ This "may be" the next big thing...

Dead Space Video

I love the style, reminds me of Bioshock but more gothic.

My love for WOW

I just love watching Blizzard trailers any time. Cheers~

All I Want for Christmas is...

a Ferrari F2008


nah~ I mean a LEGO Ferrari F2008


Yeah, who wouldn't want one of this? I won't even mind hanging around to demolish it piece by piece later on too ;)

During the annual ‘Lego World’ event in Holland, Amsterdam, 12k-20k invested and 80,000 LEGO pieces were put together to create the biggest and most lifelike LEGO F1 car. This Ferrari F1, based on the F2008, is 1:1 scale, which is fully apparently drivable model.

Full story here.

Minority Report Comes to Life

Oblong's g-speak is the OS that combines "gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels" to creating the dream-OS of every geek's desires.
Ref: http://oblong.com

Finger Wiggling Fun

Tuttuki Bako has now made poking something (not dead) actually fun.

Heavenly Sword Anime

5 short episodes that makes up Heavenly Sword the animation.

LittleBigPlanet

I feel that this is one of the coolest game lately out. It may seem like a child's game but its really very creative and hilarious how the objects look like. A little video on the creation of LittleBigPlanet, enjoy~

LittleBigBang : The Evolution Of LittleBigPlanet from Media Molecule on Vimeo.

Here is a video of the game itself,

Life and How to Survive It by Adrian Tan

Adrian Tan's speech at NTU convocation 2008. I've read his book, The Teenage Textbook when I was a 10 and I found it really interesting the way he wrote it. When I chanced upon this speech he gave this year, I couldn't resist but to pass it along because within it he has expressed several of my own principles in life with words better than I could. Enjoy~ Reference: here.

"I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you..

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that ‘Learning is a lifelong process’ and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan , and tied with San Marino . It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term ‘Karoshi’, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are ‘making a living’. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’ was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction - probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say ‘be loved’. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work - the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work.. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy."

Tetris Has A God

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov is a computer engineer from Russian developed Tetris in 1985, while working for the Computer Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Tetris grew in popularity, appearing on many platforms and styles. Though Alexey may be Tetris' creator and father. Tetris has found its God. At some point of watching this video, I actually thought that the machine will actually blow up but bear with the video and watch on till the end. The player somehow can still manage to play on.

Valve: Why the PC is the future by Oli Welsh, 27 June 2008

Original article can be found at Eurogamer.

Valve predicts that the PC is "The" games platform of the future. The PC is often viewed as a multipurpose platform rather then a games platform unlike consoles who's sole purpose are for games. Gabe Newell argues that, "There are 260 million online PC gamers, a market that dwarfs the install base of any console platform, online or offline...PCs remain at the cutting edge of hardware development, and consoles their "stepchildren", in connectivity and graphics technology especially".

Also in games reviews, there are revenues not reported withint the retail charts. Things likedigital distribution, persistence and subscription (revenues of MMO games). With the game that "considered" as the end for PC gaming, is actually the future of PC gaming. Make no sense? Until recently, the fact that World of Warcraft was generating 120 million dollars in gross revenue on a monthly basis was completely off the books," Newell says. "Essentially, [Blizzard is] creating a new Iron Man every month, in terms of the gross revenue they're generating as a studio. Any movie studio would be shouting about that from the rooftops. But it was essentially invisible."

Valve thinks that there's a silent majority of global gamers who are skipping the console era entirely, the way these developing nations already skipped dial-up internet.

The article "So You Want To Be A Game Programmer? How to get out of college and into games" by Matt Gilgenbach and Daniel Sass is a great starting point for the lost souls out there dreaming to be part of the next great game.

They gave four main pointers:

1. a tight demo.
2. a clean and professional resume.
3. some experience.
4. a pragmatic idea of what to expect.

It pays off to read the article and plan out your actions. To sum it all up, the section on the Demo is really important. The games industry is relatively young and there is a high demand for strong players in the game.

• Finish your game or demo.
• Make your demo impressive.
• Make your demo as easy as possible to view.
• Do not show off standardized class projects.

Also the last liner is something you should consider seriously.

"If you find math and physics confusing or you aren’t a hardcore coder, then game programming probably is not for you."

Being a game programmer is not the only important role in producing a game. Do some research and find out the role and suits you best. Good Luck~!

Diablo III

The long awaited dream. (May be old news already but...). I've always been a fan of Blizzard because I love RPG (Role Playing Game), I love the fantasy genre, and I love great art word. Blizzard ever so often have delivered all of my loves in one package.

Diablo II released in 2000 was a game college kids play time and again on LAN. It was great fun joining your buddies to battle evil. And we will never forget the secret cow level. The game is all about expending you fantasies, being someone extraordinary that you can't be in real life (like a sorceress), being a hero, and loads more.

So the long awaited dream is the sequel, Diablo III was annouced on the 28th June 2008 and is currently in development right now. Diablo III used the Havok physics engine and loads of new features developed for the StarCraft II. The HUD (Head Up Display) looks like a blend between the original Diablo style and World of Warcraft's icons. The graphics is just so Blizzard. Below are some videos on Diablo III:~

Diablo 3 2008 Movie Trailer Blizzard Worldwide Invitational


Diablo 3 Gameplay Video Part 1


Diablo 3 Gameplay Video Part 2

Greek Drinks

Discovered a new drink from some Greek friends of mine. Its call Ouzo.

First prepare the Raki. Raki (Turkish: rakı, pronounced [raˈkɯ] ) is a non-sweet, anise-flavored spirit popularly consumed in Turkey as an apéritif. First add honey, anise and pure Suma to boil.

Raki = honey + star anise + Suma

Then Ouzo is created by adding some water and the clear spirit becomes white. Ouzo (ούζο) is an anise-flavored spirit that is widely consumed in Greece and Cyprus. Its taste is quite similar to arak/raki in the Levant and Turkey, pastis or absinthe (France), Sambuca (Italy), mastika (Chios). It can be consumed neat or mixed with water.

Ouzo = Raki + water

The drink is drunk hot and it is great during winter with the hint of spicy taste that lingers.

My Dream Car

Its been some time since I last posted anything on this site. I've been busy with my semester 2 and currently I'm entering into semester 3, the time I'm going to spend on my Masters Dissertation Project. Well, now with the flexible schedule, I would like to share this cool car from BMW that winks (yeah really~). Thanks Victor for introducing this beauty to me...